Shad got painfully to his feet and started dragging his clothes on. The girl looked up at him gleefully and started rolling around on the roof, skinny pale legs and buttocks contrasting with the heavy coat shed never taken off. He picked up his Manchukuoian jacket and shrugged it on. He felt a chill and stole a little heat from the still autumn night, his cloud of darkness rising above the building as he drank in scarce photons.

He wondered if this was what she'd had in mind all along, if this was why she'd been following him around. Maybe she had a crush on him.

Funny way to show a crush, though.

The street artist came up behind him, put her arms around his waist. She pressed herself very close behind him and began rocking back and forth, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. Her hands rubbed lower, pressing over his cock.

"I have an apartment near here," he said. "You mind if we go there, or does this have to happen out of doors?" She didn't appear to care one way or another. Shad picked her up, covered them both with darkness, and went straightline, up and over buildings, till he came to his own illegal loft. He snapped on the light for which he stole electricity from Peoples' Edison. The street artist was already on the bed, legs parted, arms stretched out.

Shad looked down at the naked vulva and the skinny legs in their heavy boots. Little stones from the flat tar roof were still clinging to her skin. "Not much time for romance in your life, huh?" he said. He bent down, began undoing bootlaces. "Let's at least get these off, okay?"

The second act was only a little less frenzied than the first, and afterward Shad lay facedown on the bed while she carefully licked the blood from the wounds she'd clawed into him. It had become obvious by now that she didn't bathe very often. He got her into his shower and scrubbed her down while she made little bubbling sounds and did a kind of dance, arms over her head, spinning around and around on her toes while the warm water splashed down around her.

When he handed her one of his threadbare proletarian towels, she raised it to her nose and took a suspicious sniff before she used it. Naked, her hair wet, her thin body looked maybe all of twelve years old. Great, Shad thought, now he'd added pedophilia to his list of crimes.

He took his billfold out of his pocket and took out the photo he'd carefully cut out of a 1988 issue of the New York Herald and Worker that he'd found in the library. He showed it to her. "This is where I'd like to go," he said. "Ellis Island. The Rox. Okay?"

She took the picture, looked at it without interest, then handed it back to him. She climbed into his narrow bed, curled up, and closed her eyes.

He sat down on the edge of the cot and looked down at her. Her body was covered with scars and calluses, and there was a big yellow bruise on one shoulder. What looked like a long knife slash ran down the side of one thigh. Shad traced the scar with his finger, and sadness welled up the back of his throat.

"Shit, girl," he said, "you don't have to live like this. Even in my world we can find somebody to take care of you. Hell, I'll take care of you. It doesn't matter that you can't talk." He looked up at her. "You understand me? IT take care of you, okay? Back in the world, I've got more money than I know what to do with. We can live like royalty. Anyplace you want, anything you want. Okay?"

The street artist was asleep.

He curled up next to her, spoon-style, and tried to work out exactly what it was he'd just proposed, taking care of a mute feral joker girl whose talents seemed confined to chalk sketching and indiscriminate animal sex. This would not, he concluded, be the sort of relationship of which Social Services would approve.

Other consequences occurred to him. If this was her usual mode of sexual contact, she'd probably picked up any number of diseases, some of which were known only by acronyms, some of which might be from other worlds. Maybe he ought to be soaking his dick in alcohol. And if he'd managed to get her pregnant-well, both parents were wild cards, and that meant a 100 percent certainty that the kid would inherit the bent wild card DNA, which meant a 99 percent chance of jokerhood or death when the virus manifested. He wondered how much sadder this could get.

He found out later, sometime the next morning, when the street artist woke up and elbowed him awake. She pushed him over on his back and started rubbing her crotch against his dick. He was hard almost instantly, and she reached down to insert him as casually as if she were handling a bar of soap. Her intent cat's eyes were fixed intently on his. His vision was better than hers, reached into more spectra.

She leaned over him when she came, hips pumping blindly over his groin. Her claws gripped his mattress, punctured his sheets. Her mouth was open, and strange croaking sounds came out. He could look past her teeth and see, glowing with IR heat, the stub of a tongue that ended in a mass of scar tissue.

Someone had cut her tongue out.

She fell asleep instantly, her head on his chest. Shad wanted to cry.

Take care of her? What a joke.

Hours later, he awoke to the scratching of chalk. He opened gummed eyes and saw the street artist back in her clothes, drawing something on the particleboard floor. A plastic plate near her hand held a half-eaten sandwich made from some Polish sausage he had in his icebox.

He looked at the clock and saw it was late afternoon. He dressed, had a sandwich, and watched her work.

She was drawing a cavern-irregular walls, stalactites, strange subterranean gleams. The sketch occupied the whole floor, and large parts weren't finished yet.

"The Rox," Shad said. He pointed at his clipping again. "Ellis Island. You understand?"

She looked up at him and wrinkled up her face, then went back to her sketch.

Shad gazed bleakly into a future in which he was dragged from one world to another by this child, used for sex in one venue after another. Love-slave of the multiverse. Wonderful.

It was night before Chalktalk was finished. Shad put on his darkest clothes, black Kenyan cords, navy shirt, the boots he'd come in, his quilted Manchukuoian jacket. If they were going spelunking, it was likely to get cold. He made two packages of food, wrapped them in tinfoil, stuffed one in his pocket and gave the other to Chalktalk. He thought about getting flashlights and decided it would be a worthwhile investment. He went to the store and bought two big electric lanterns.

He stepped up behind her, looked at the growing picture, put his hand on her shoulder. She gave him an irritated look and shrugged the hand off.

Looked like the romance had gone out of their relationship. The picture deepened, the third dimension dropping away, receding to a glittering cavern.

The girl took his hand, and reality fell away.

Darkness, darkness entire. Shad felt right at home.

He flicked on the lantern, and Robert Fallon Penn lunged out of the night, garrote in hand, smiling his twisted blood-flecked smile.

Neil was ten years old when he'd last seen Penn. Penn's partner, Stan Barker, was sodomizing Neil from behind while Penn played with his garrote, putting on the pressure till he started to black out, then sportively easing up, prolonging the agony 'a little longer.

He, his father, his mother, and his little sister had spent the weekend under torture, and Neil was the last one left alive. Stan Barker had just cut his father's throat, and Shad remembered how slippery the floor had been, how his hands and knees slid in the darkening wetness while Penn jerked on his throat with his wire and Barker clutched at his hips…

And now Bob Penn was back, leering at him, blood flaking off his lips because he'd bitten off Mrs. Carter's nipples. Lightning burned through Shad's nerves. He gave a scream and swung the lantern. Somehow Penn avoided injury. Chalktalk looked at him impatiently. She grabbed his sleeve and tried to pull him toward Penn.